You're looking at five friendly bacterial families in the human navel, captured under a scanning electron microscope. In August, biologist Rob Dunn, an associate professor at North Carolina State University, released the biggest dataset of skin microbes to date, revealing that our belly buttons house about 2,400 types of microbes -- 1,500 of which are new to science. "We still don't understand why microbes on various people differ," says Dunn, "even as we understand more about microbes as defenders of our skin."
In 2011, Dunn's lab launched the Belly Button Biodiversity project. What began as a way to get people excited about the microbiome became a serious endeavour when Dunn discovered the diversity in our navels. The August data dump included profiles of 273 participants, which the team posted on yourwildlife.org for microbe hunters to explore. "We're still shining modest lights into a wilderness of species," Dunn says. "There are just more lights."
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
